Amazon Silk: New web browser taps cloud for flexibility

It’s not just Kindles and tablets in the news from Amazon this morning. The Seattle company is also announcing a new web browser, dubbed Amazon Silk, that makes use of its Amazon Web Services cloud computing infrastructure in a bid for a more efficient browsing experience under the hood.

Instead of a device-siloed software application, Amazon Silk deploys a split-architecture. All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says in a news release: “We refactored and rebuilt the browser software stack and now push pieces of the computation into the AWS cloud. When you use Silk — without thinking about it or doing anything explicit — you’re calling on the raw computational horsepower of Amazon EC2 to accelerate your web browsing.”

Imagine the possibilities when a web browser is powered by a vast, scalable server fleet, massive network connections, and limitless storage resources. Can you think of ways to use those assets to make the browsing experience faster or to introduce previously impossible features?

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Comments

Matthew Williams

You know. AOL use to do this back in the day. If you remember they use to serve all of their internet traffic from one location and apply a compression logic to all images that came accross to speed up dial up connections. This is obviously much smarter and on a much more powerful platform (EC2).